AI

Meta and Google Cloud Forge $10 Billion AI Partnership Meta Platforms has entered into a landmark six-year agreement with Google Cloud, valued at over $10 billion, to significantly enhance its artificial intelligence infrastructure. This strategic partnership will see Meta leverage Google Cloud’s comprehensive suite of services, including servers, storage, and networking, to power its ambitious AI expansion. The deal is a critical component of Meta’s plan to scale its data center capacity to approximately 1 gigawatt of compute power, utilizing over 1.3 million GPUs in 2025. This collaboration underscores the intense investment and competition within the AI sector, as tech giants commit substantial capital to advance their capabilities. For Google Cloud, this agreement represents a major victory in its ongoing competition with other leading cloud providers. ...

Liquid AI Releases LFM2-VL: Open-Weight Vision-Language Models for On-Device AI Liquid AI has released LFM2-VL, a new family of open-weight vision-language foundation models created for low-latency, on-device deployment. The new models are designed to run efficiently on smartphones, laptops, wearables, and other embedded systems without needing to rely on cloud infrastructure. LFM2-VL is available in two versions: LFM2-VL-450M for highly resource-constrained devices and the more powerful LFM2-VL-1.6B. These models can process both text and images, offering up to twice the inference speed on a GPU compared to similar existing models. The models are available on Hugging Face under a license based on Apache 2.0, allowing for free academic and research use, as well as commercial use for smaller companies. ...

MIT Report: 95% of Enterprise GenAI Projects Fail to Deliver ROI A new report from MIT’s NANDA initiative reveals that a staggering 95% of enterprise generative AI pilot programs are failing to produce a significant return on investment. Despite investments totaling between $35 and $40 billion in the US, only 5% of organizations have successfully deployed AI tools into production at scale. The report, titled “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” is based on interviews with enterprise leaders, analysis of public AI initiatives, and a survey of business professionals. The primary reasons for failure are not a lack of infrastructure or talent, but rather the inability of AI systems to retain data, adapt, and learn over time. The study also found that purchasing AI tools from vendors and forming partnerships has a significantly higher success rate than in-house development. ...

Medallion Raises $43M to Streamline Healthcare Credentialing with AI Platform Medallion, a healthcare technology company, has secured $43 million in new funding for its AI-powered platform, CredAlliance. The platform is designed to streamline the complex healthcare credentialing process for both insurers and clinicians. It manages the entire provider lifecycle—including credentialing, enrollment, onboarding, and compliance—aiming to significantly reduce administrative waste and combat clinician burnout. CredAlliance acts as a unified system for provider data management, enabling customers to efficiently verify credentials and maintain up-to-date network information. This latest investment, led by Acrew Capital, elevates Medallion’s total funding to $130 million and will fuel the expansion of the platform’s capabilities. ...

Weekly Tech News Digest: August 17, 2025 AI Trial Aims to Accelerate NHS Hospital Discharges An artificial intelligence (AI) tool designed to accelerate the patient discharge process is being trialed at a London hospital trust. The platform aims to reduce delays and free up beds by automatically completing the necessary documents for patients fit to go home. Piloted at the Chelsea and Westminster NHS trust, the technology extracts information from medical records, such as diagnoses and test results, to draft discharge summaries. Health Secretary Wes Streeting stated that this innovation will allow doctors to spend less time on paperwork and more on patient care, ultimately helping to cut down waiting times. The tool will be hosted on the NHS Federated Data Platform, a system intended to improve collaboration between healthcare organizations. ...

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Meta Faces Backlash Over AI Guidelines Permitting ‘Sensual’ Chats With Minors Meta is under intense scrutiny after a report revealed its internal AI guidelines permitted chatbots to engage in ‘romantic or sensual’ conversations with children. An internal policy document, which the company confirmed as authentic, outlined rules that allowed for inappropriate interactions, sparking public backlash and prompting an investigation from US Senator Josh Hawley. The guidelines also reportedly allowed the AI to generate false medical information and assist with racially insensitive arguments. In response, Meta stated the examples were ’erroneous and inconsistent’ with their policies and have since been removed, acknowledging inconsistent enforcement of their safety rules. ...

Beijing Hosts Inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games The first-ever World Humanoid Robot Games have commenced in Beijing, drawing 280 teams from 16 countries. This three-day event showcases the latest advancements in humanoid robot technology through a series of demanding competitions. Robots are competing in 26 different events, including athletic challenges like running and football, alongside skill-based tasks such as cleaning and sorting pharmaceuticals. The games are designed to test the robots’ intelligent decision-making and collaborative movement capabilities in extreme scenarios. This event, following the 2025 World Robot Conference, aims to accelerate the real-world application of humanoid robots in sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, and domestic services. ...

OpenAI Releases GPT-OSS, Its First Open-Source Large Language Models In a significant move for the AI and open-source software communities, OpenAI has released GPT-OSS, its first-ever family of open-source large language models. Licensed under the permissive Apache 2.0, this release introduces two powerful models: gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. Both are engineered for efficient inference and strong reasoning, leveraging a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. The larger gpt-oss-120b model rivals OpenAI’s proprietary o4-mini and operates on a single 80GB GPU. Meanwhile, the compact gpt-oss-20b model, comparable to o3-mini, is optimized for on-device AI applications, requiring as little as 16GB of memory. Complementing the models, OpenAI also launched ‘Harmony,’ an open-source project defining a new prompt template format. ...

AI Discovers Stronger, More Durable Plastics in Materials Science Breakthrough Researchers at MIT and Duke University have utilized machine learning to develop significantly more durable plastics, a breakthrough that could lead to longer-lasting products and a reduction in plastic waste. The AI model identified novel crosslinker molecules, known as mechanophores, that can be integrated into polymer materials to make them more resistant to tearing. These mechanophores respond to mechanical force, allowing the material to withstand greater stress before breaking. After the AI model performed a rapid computational analysis of thousands of potential molecules, a task that would have been incredibly time-consuming with traditional methods, researchers synthesized a polymer with one of the identified candidates. The resulting material was found to be approximately four times tougher than plastics made with standard crosslinkers. This AI-driven approach to polymer science not only accelerated the discovery process but also uncovered new design principles for creating more resilient polymers. ...

OpenAI Launches GPT-5, Its Most Advanced AI Model Yet OpenAI has officially launched GPT-5, its latest and most powerful AI system. The company touts the new generative AI model as a major leap in artificial intelligence, showcasing state-of-the-art capabilities in coding, mathematics, creative writing, and health. GPT-5 operates as a unified system, engineered to provide rapid answers for simple queries and engage in deeper, longer ’thinking’ for more complex problems. The model is now available to all users, with premium access and features reserved for Plus and Pro subscribers. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman highlighted the model’s evolution, comparing GPT-3 to a high school student and GPT-4 to a college student, while describing GPT-5 as a ‘PhD-level expert.’ This landmark release is a significant move for OpenAI, poised to solidify its leadership in the competitive generative AI industry. ...